There is a particular kind of doctor who visits hospital patients. You know the one. He sweeps into the room with purpose, clipboard in hand, delivers his report in under three minutes, and then pivots toward the door with the energy of someone who has eleven more rooms to get to. And just as his foot hits the threshold, he says it: “Do you have any questions?”

My mother always did.

“Yes,” she would say, from her hospital bed, in her late eighties, with more grace than most of us will ever manage. “Would you please tell me one thing about yourself?”

And just like that, the doctor would stop. Turn around. And more often than not, pull up a chair.

That was my mother. Dori Chaconas. Children’s book author. Needlework designer. Painter. Singer of nursery rhymes, twister of truth, and the woman who could make anyone in any room feel like the most important person in it. Even when she was the one who was supposed to need something from them.

Especially then.

She passed away on May 9th, at 88 years old, completely on her own terms. After a hospital stay that resulted in a rapid decline and much distress, she chose hospice. Once she made that decision and met with her priest, she was at peace. Genuinely, completely at peace. She was not afraid. She was looking forward to being reunited with the love of her life, my dad, her forever sweetheart, the man she was married to for nearly 66 years and had been separated from for only two and a half years by his death.

I have been thinking about her every single day since. And I have been thinking about what she left behind, not just in the 30+ children’s books on shelves around the world, or the needlework designs sold to big-city companies, or the paintings she gave away before she ever got to see them on a gallery wall. But what she left tucked away in me. In the way I work. In the way I see people.

This post is for her. And it is also, maybe, for you.

The Woman Who Figured It Out

My mother did not wait until she had all the answers.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she started writing children’s stories with no roadmap, no industry contacts, and no guarantee that anyone would ever read a single word. She mailed manuscripts off into the void, genuinely worried she was wasting the cost of a stamp. She received rejections. She kept going anyway. And it worked. She was published regularly in Highlights for Children and sold four picture books to major publishing houses before life pulled her in other directions.

A few years later, she turned that same relentless energy toward needlework design. Instead of buying kits like everyone else, she created her own original designs and mailed them off to major companies, Bucilla, Paragon, William E. Wright. They bought them. One of her most iconic pieces, a Bicentennial Set sold to Paragon, carries her name as copyright owner. In her basement, I recently found the original copyright papers sent directly to her from the Library of Congress. She sold hundreds of designs, helping support our family financially while feeding her creative hunger, all without the internet, without Google, without a single search result to guide her.

She just figured it out.

She had four daughters, a husband she adored, and a creative fire that refused to be silenced. Throughout my childhood, she worked part time at a preschool, a nursing home, a medical clinic, a hospital, and still she carved out time to write, to design, to create. When life pulled her away from writing for nearly thirty years, she eventually found her way back.

In her own words: 

“I quieted my creative demon in snitches and snatches of small projects until 1997, when two amazing things happened. My daughter, Stacy DeKeyser, started to write, and I was introduced to this new, alien thing called a computer. I had EMAIL! Stacy lived in Atlanta and cyber channels smoked with our back and forth messages about writing, she asking questions about my long ago experiences, and me, trying to remember. She introduced me to online writers’ groups and after a few short months, I was drawn back into the world of writing.”

[If you have a middle schooler at home you may already know Stacy’s work. And if you don’t, you should. Her novel The Rhino in Right Field is loosely based on our father’s childhood, growing up in Milwaukee as the son of Greek immigrants. A kid named Nick, a baseball contest to become batboy for a day, and a rhino named Tank who almost ruins it all. Trust me on this one.]

Mom’s picture book On a Wintry Morning came out in 2000, earned two starred reviews, and won the Archer/Eckblad Award for best picture book by a Wisconsin author that year.

She was astonished. She probably shouldn’t have been. But that was also very her.

What She Taught Me Without Ever Saying A Word

I did not grow up thinking of my mother as exceptional. She was just Mom.

Her creativity was so woven into the fabric of our daily life that it never occurred to me to be impressed by it. She wrote. She designed. She sang nursery rhymes. She told stories. That was just who she was. She was my mom. 

It was not until I was building my own business, picking up a camera knowing absolutely nothing about photography and even less about how to run a business, that I started to understand what she had actually given me.

It was not just the creativity, although I will take that too.

It was the tenacity.

The willingness to throw something out into the wind and trust that the work is worth doing even before you know how it lands. The ability to set your mind to something, learn what you need to learn, and keep going, not because you have all the answers, but because the alternative is not creating at all. And that is not really an option for people like us.

I had the internet. She had the USPS and sheer nerve. We both figured it out.

And I think about that a lot when I am working with someone who walks into a session unsure of herself, arms crossed, certain the camera will somehow expose everything she is most insecure about. I think about what it means to just begin. To not wait until you feel ready. To trust the process even when the outcome is not guaranteed.

My mother never waited to feel ready. She just started.

The Candy Bowl and the Doctor’s Chair

Here is what I keep coming back to, though.

More than the books. More than the needlework designs or the paintings or the publishing credits.

It was the candy bowl.

At the end of her life, when she could no longer get out of bed, my mother kept a bowl of candy on her bedside table. Every nurse, every aide, every person who came into that room, she would simply point. Take a piece. That was it. That was the whole gesture. But it was never really about the candy.

It was the same instinct that made her stop a doctor mid-exit with a question. Would you please tell me one thing about yourself? It was the same instinct that made her gift her paintings to her caregivers before she ever got to see them hanging in a gallery. She had been scheduled to display her paintings at her local library in Germantown, Wisconsin, in May. She died on May 9th. So instead of saving those paintings for an event she would never get to enjoy, she gave them away. To the therapists and aides who had cared for her. To the people who came into her room every day.

She did not make things to keep them. She made things to give them away.

The therapists at the rehab center, people she had known from a stay three years earlier, came to visit her every single day after she transitioned to hospice. Not because it was their job. But because she had made them feel seen.

That is the thread that weaves through the fabric of her life. The doctor story, the candy bowl, the paintings. They are all the same sentence: I see you. You matter. Come back in.

My mother was genuinely curious about people. She paid attention in a way that most of us forget to. And I think about this every single time I pick up my camera. Because that is what I am trying to do too. Not just make a pretty picture, but make the person in front of my lens feel like the most important person in the world.

She taught me that. Without ever once saying it out loud.

What Lives On in the Work

My mother built something that will outlast her. Her quiet grace has a reach so expansive that it’s hard to fathom. Truly the butterfly effect in full and beautiful execution. 

Thirty-plus children’s books in homes and libraries across the globe. Hundreds of needlework designs stitched by countless hands. Paintings hanging on the walls of nurses and therapists who loved her. Four daughters. Three grandsons, two granddaughters, three great-grandchildren. And a body of work that is somehow both deeply personal and widely shared, stories written with the specific intention of making a child laugh, of making them feel something real.

She said it herself, in her own biography:

Close your eyes and imagine you hear a child laugh. Then imagine that you are the one who made him laugh. Can you feel that inner glow?

That is why she wrote. That quiet, unmistakable feeling of knowing your work touched someone.

I understand that feeling. It is why I do what I do.

Every portrait is, in its own way, a love letter frozen in time. A senior on the edge of her next chapter. A family on what feels like an ordinary Sunday but will someday feel like everything. A mother and daughter holding on for just a few minutes longer. These are the moments I get to document, and someday they will matter in ways no one could have predicted. A mother will open a box and find it. A daughter will recognize herself in it decades later. It will outlast the session, outlast the worry about whether the lighting was perfect, outlast everything except the love behind it.

My mother understood legacy intuitively. She was not trying to leave one. She was just making things and sharing them, one story, one design, one painting at a time. The legacy showed up on its own because the work was real and the intention behind it was love.

That is what I want my work to be.

One Last Thing

The morning she died, I was sleeping in the recliner beside her bed. All night I had drifted in and out, and every time I surfaced I could hear her breathing, steady and present, and I would call to her in the dark: I love you Mom. I am right here.

Sometime before dawn I fell into a deeper sleep than I had all night. I did not hear the nurses come in for the 4am check. I did not hear them give her medications or tend to her. I slept through all of it. And then, slowly, I became aware of something. A soft glow at the window. And birdsong, that particular kind of birdsong that only happens in the first few minutes of morning, when the world is just beginning to wake.

And I could no longer hear her breathing.

I believe she waited until I was deeply asleep. My mother was a woman who liked to go to bed early, who would happily excuse herself from Sunday family dinners with a cheerful “Stay and visit as long as you like. I’m heading to bed. Love you all.” She valued her privacy and her peace. I don’t believe she wanted anyone watching, waiting, hovering. She slipped away quietly, on her own terms, the same way she lived her entire life. That was her. Thinking of others, even then. Especially then.

After I notified the nurse, an aide came in. Third shift. Someone I had never seen before and still cannot describe to you. She was masked, wearing a surgical cap, her face completely covered. She came straight across the room and wrapped her arms around me like a blanket. She was crying, and she said:

“She loved you girls so much. What a gift you all were to her.”

This woman I could not see. This faceless warmth of a stranger at the break of dawn. These arms around me in a room that had just gotten very quiet and very still.

I have thought about it a hundred times since. About how my mother, even at the very end, had made such an impression on someone who worked the overnight shift that she crossed a room in tears to hold her daughter.

She saw people her entire life. And at the very end, they saw her right back.

A few days before she died, she sent me a text. A final gift of her words, her writing, just for me.

“Please don’t be sad for me. I have a zip line to heaven. I am confident that I have good, kind, competent daughters. I am forever grateful to God and to your dad for helping raise you to the beautiful creatures that you are. Support each other always. Just continue to do what you’re doing, support your sisters and your husband. I love you always.”

My mother built a family worth celebrating. I get to photograph families worth celebrating. I do not think that is a coincidence.

I think the birds that morning were her way of telling me she made it. That she was okay. That she had found her way back to my dad, to her forever sweetheart, after two and a half years of missing him so much it hurt.

I hope I spend the rest of my life doing what she did. Seeing people. Making beautiful things. Giving them away.

And trusting that the work, the real work, always finds its way home.

I miss you, Mom…and I promise that I will continue to try every day to be curious, to truly see people, and to make you proud.

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Dori Chaconas, 1938 – 2026. Beloved mother, author, artist, and the woman who saw everything, and missed nothing.